Wednesday, August 8th, 2007

Greater Good Magazine recently published an intriguing article on the evolution of psychological measures taken not only against enemy soldiers, but on our own troops as well. Up until Korea, the vast majority of soldiers (well over half!) would not attack the enemy in combat. They would, however, serve in other valiant ways - running orders, rescuing comrades, bringing ammo to gun posts, etc.

From the article:

Thus the evidence shows that the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be “conscientious objectors”—yet there seems to be a conspiracy of silence on this subject. In his book War on the Mind, Peter Watson observes that Marshall’s findings have been largely ignored by academia and the fields of psychiatry and psychology.

But they were very much taken to heart by the U.S. Army, and a number of training measures were instituted as a result of Marshall’s suggestions. According to studies by the U.S. military, these changes resulted in a firing rate of 55 percent in Korea and 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam. Some modern soldiers use the disparity between the firing rates of World War II and Vietnam to claim that S.L.A. Marshall had to be wrong, for the average military leader has a hard time believing that any significant body of his soldiers will not do its job in combat. But these doubters don’t give sufficient credit to the revolutionary corrective measures and training methods introduced over the past half century.

Over time, the military realized that most people would defend themselves but not actively seek to take another soldier’s life. Eventually, the ‘need’ arose to do more to get soldiers prepared to fight in battle, and be willing to take another man’s life. Thus began indoctrination targeted at desensitizing new recruits to the horrors of war, and the difficultly that must be involved in killing another man - even if it is in combat.

A very interesting look into why we train our soldiers the way we do.

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Posted on August 8th, 2007 | No Comments »

Monday, August 6th, 2007

As correspondent Steve Kroft first reported earlier this year, he is the nation’s top accountant, the comptroller general of the United States. He’s totaled up our government’s income, liabilities, and future obligations and concluded that our current standard of living is unsustainable unless some drastic action is taken. And he’s not alone. It’s been called the “dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows” – a set of financial truths so inconvenient that most elected officials don’t even want to talk about them, which is exactly why David Walker does.

“I would argue that the most serious threat to the United States is not someone hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan but our own fiscal irresponsibility,” Walker tells Kroft.

While this is common sense, I still think people think that we can continue to live the way we do now, into perpetuity, with little or no changes on our part. These people are sadly mistaken, and without a real commitment to altering our lifestyles, foreign policy, spending habits, and attitudes about energy, we are doomed to fulfill this prophecy.

Posted on August 6th, 2007 | No Comments »